Crisps: from special treat to standby snack

Real game chips are a joy, but is our national crisp habit out of hand?

Monday is the Glorious Twelfth, which means the start of the grouse season. It also means watercress, bread sauce and a golden mound of game chips.

Real game chips are a very delicious thing, as a once- or twice-a-year indulgence. When the potatoes are cut super-fine with a food processor, fried fresh in hot oil and well drained they go toasty-brown and rich. Yet it’s hard to suppress the thought that you are really eating nothing but crisps.

Game chips can no longer be such a special treat when crisps are something many in Britain eat every day with a sandwich for lunch; then again with a drink in the pub; plus, at odd peckish moments of the day. Our national crisp habit is wildly out of hand. We consume around 20 million packets a day. In 2011 the British Heart Foundation found that British children were more likely to eat crisps at lunch than fruit: 34 per cent as against 31 per cent.

The crisp has come a long way. In the 19th century, fried slivers of potatoes – sometimes called wafer potatoes – were considered French and posh. We can gauge just how posh by the fact that silver potato-chip servers were sold. They were more of a garnish – like croûtons – than something for eating by themselves.

When you make game chips from scratch, you notice that they don’t keep well. A mere five minutes out of the oil, and half their charm is gone. So it’s surprising, in a way, that they made it as a mass-market snack. Early attempts to market crisps were slightly farcical. In America, from the 1890s, writes the food historian Andrew F Smith, grocery stores kept them in barrels. The shopkeeper would dish them out into paper bags and customers would take them home to warm in the oven, a 'cumbersome process’ that resulted in 'stale chips’.

In Britain, too, crisp manufacturing was hit and miss. By the 1940s there were 800 small British crisp producers. But the batch-fried potatoes they produced were variable in quality. A crisp can go wrong in so many ways: it can burn, it can be swimming in oil, or the oil can be stale. In addition, the waxed glassine paper in which they were packed gave the crisps a shelf-life of just three days.

It was only in the 1960s that, as the crisp historian Alan Bevan wrote, crisps became a 'glamour product’ in Britain. There were two key breakthroughs. The first was new continuous fryers that enabled factories to process up to 8,000lb of raw potatoes an hour. The second was plastic laminate packaging, which gave crisps a shelf-life of six months. There were now huge profits to be made, and the 1960s saw vicious battles between Smith’s – the market leader – and up-and-coming Golden Wonder (Walkers at this time had just 12 per cent of the market, as against 50 per cent today). Golden Wonder embarked on an advertising campaign to persuade us that crisps were a nourishing snack.

We didn’t need much persuading. After all, what’s not to love about salty fried potatoes that make a crunch when you chew? The real question is what it would take to persuade us to eat fewer of them again.